Shakespeare’s Globe director opens the doors to gender parity

When Emma Rice, the incoming artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, announced her inaugural London season this week, she stressed her intention to achieve gender parity on the stage. It is an admirable aim and she makes a start simply by being there: the first female artistic director of the Globe is one of a small but growing number of women in charge of major theatres.

She faces a hefty challenge. The Globe is devoted largely to Shakespeare and more than three-quarters of the characters in the collected works are men.

While that is understandable, reflecting the politics of the periods that Shakespeare depicts and the theatre practice of his time, Ms Rice is right to suggest that contemporary productions should sometimes look for a balance that better fits the 21st century and advances greater equality on stage.

Her predecessors at the Globe tackled the issue to some degree. Dominic Dromgoole, whom Rice succeeds, commissioned new plays with eponymous female leads, including Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn, which is about to transfer to the West End . Notably, Ms Rice’s first season will include a “reclaimed” Cymbeline, tweaked and renamed after Imogen, the main female character and Cymbeline’s daughter.

It is not difficult to change the sex in casting small roles in Shakespeare — soldiers, servants and dignitaries. And there are some wonderful female characters in Shakespeare’s work, Rosalind, Portia, Viola, Cleopatra and Beatrice among them. But the real Everest parts, those that encompass the greatest psychological and philosophical depth and test actors to their utmost, are men: Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Prospero, Richard II, Richard III and Henry V.

Over the years, leading female actors have taken matters into their own hands and have simply played them. Fiona Shaw and Cate Blanchett tackled Richard II; Maxine Peake’s recent Hamlet is the latest in a line of female Princes of Denmark that goes back to the great Victorian actor Sarah Bernhardt (whose performance prompted a duel).

Meanwhile Phyllida Lloyd has directed several all-female productions, including The Taming of the Shrew (at the Globe), Julius Caesar and Henry IV (both at London’s Donmar Warehouse).

Some might bridle at such experimentation, seeing it as contrary to the Bard’s original intentions. But we have seen countless innovations in stage practice that he might well have embraced had he had the opportunity.

Shakespeare wrote for all-male companies — a practice we have long abandoned, with the odd deliberate exception — and relished the possibilities that cross-dressing and gender-bending afforded. As You Like It and Twelfth Night, two of his loveliest comedies, would have had a boy playing a girl playing a boy in Elizabethan times, and both explore the confusion of sexuality and identity. And if boys can be girls, why shouldn’t ladies be lads?

It is risky of course and there are few things worse in theatre than a gimmick. But at its best the practice of gender-swapping the great roles — or even the entire play — can prove revealing. It can highlight ambiguities in a character, exposing gaps between him and the expectations of him as a man or as a leader. It can also expose power structures and bring the female characters into stark relief. It can be funny and shocking: Janet McTeer, playing Petruchio in a 2003 production of Taming of the Shrew, peed against a column.

Conversely it can be moving: Kathryn Hunter, as Lear, brought out the androgynous frailty of advanced old age. And perhaps most interesting are the moments when gender distinctions disappear and you see afresh the universality of Shakespeare’s greatest characters.

So perhaps it is once more unto the breeches for Ms Rice. And, however far she goes or how well she succeeds, let us hope no one ends up fighting a duel over the matter.

The writer is an FT theatre critic